The 76-year-old woman who killed her doctor husband and stashed his body away for seven months while collecting his University of Connecticut paychecks was found dead Wednesday — hours before she was to be sentenced for the cold-blooded slaying.
Police found Linda Kosuda-Bigazzi’s body after being called to her Burlington home for a welfare check shortly after 10:30 a.m., state police said.
The convicted killer was due in Hartford Superior Court at 2 p.m. to be formally sentenced to 13 years in prison for the 2017 death of her husband, Dr. Pierluigi Bigazzi, 84.
Her lawyer, Patrick Tomasiewicz, said her death was “not anticipated,” but eerily insinuated that Kosuda-Bigazzi may have had a hand in her fate.
“We were honored to be her legal counsel and did our very best to defend her in a complex case for the past six years,” he said in a statement.
“She was a very independent woman who was always in control of her own destiny.”
When Kosuda-Bigazzi died and what caused her death is still being probed, but troopers described the incident as an “untimely death investigation.”
She pleaded guilty to manslaughter and larceny in March in connection to the slaying of Bigazzi, a professor of laboratory science and pathology at UConn Health.
Kosuda-Bigazzi — who was also a scientist and worked with her husband — was arrested after his body was found in February 2018, but had been free on home confinement after agreeing to wear a monitoring ankle bracelet and posting a $1.5 million bond.
In writing stashed in their home, Kosuda-Bigazzi admitted she killed her husband with a hammer in July 2017, but claimed she was acting in self-defense.
Bigazzi ran at his wife with a hammer during an argument that was ignited after she told him their backyard deck needed repairs, she wrote. Kosuda-Bigazzi claims she wrestled the weapon away before smashing it against his skull.
“I hit him just swinging the hammer in any direction + then he was quiet — for a few seconds + then he stopped breathing,” she wrote, according to investigators.
“I just wanted to slow him down. I sat on the floor by the kitchen cabinets across from the stove — next to him for a long time.”
Kosuda-Bigazzi wrapped her husband’s body in plastic and stashed it in the basement of their home until it was discovered seven months later during a wellness check ordered by his UConn Health colleagues.
The doctor had not been seen since the summer, but his checks were deposited into the couple’s joint account until his body was found, investigators said.
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